Akella, Usha: Tomorrow’s poem

I want to begin a poem
without saying “I want,”
Wait like a page or
          undone button in the dust,
A poem that comes like
a blighted ovum,
fading as a body fades into a shroud.
 
inside, demons are persistent like
worker bees,
There are hungers
that are not quenched
with food or the spirit,
it is not the unwillingness to surrender
to the divine but
the unwillingness to
give up on the human,

This is the curse in my soul,
I want the one as the many.
 
All that is good is in small quantities,
                Like the hidden flames in flowers,
                    Like eyes which are magic lamps
                      holding the universe,
All that ties us is invisible,
                                     trailing umbilical chords unsevered.
 
They tell me prophets are missing from caves,
their words floating in bottles in old seas,
and old cities surface like prophecies,
and someone is a silent incarnation working like yeast,
 
for some this is enough,
 
here, I don’t know that face in the mirror,
a ship afar, the sails down.